Why Community Depth Matters More Than Reach: Lessons from Leslie Barber

# Format: Event Recaps

# Community

A conversation on why smaller, more intentional community experiences often create stronger trust, better insight, and more lasting business value.

April 20, 2026

Leslie Barber

Joshua Zerkel

A lot of community teams get pushed toward the same set of questions.

How many people joined?

How many people showed up?

How many views did it get?

How fast is it growing?

Those questions are understandable. Most businesses are wired to look for more. More customers, more revenue, more pipeline, more activity. So when community sits inside that environment, it’s natural for success to get framed the same way.

But the longer I’ve done this work, the more I’ve seen how incomplete that picture is.

A community can be large and still feel empty. An event can have strong attendance and lead to very little connection. A program can look healthy from the outside and still fail to give people a real reason to come back.

That was a big part of what came up in my conversation with Leslie Barber during this month’s Context First session. Leslie has spent years building communities across companies like Intuit, BetterUp, and BILL, and one of the things I appreciate about how she talks about this work is that she doesn’t romanticize it. She’s very clear-eyed about the tension. Reach is easy to understand. Reach is easy to celebrate. But resonance is where the real value starts to show up.

And it’s usually much harder to build.

What resonance actually looks like

One of the most useful parts of the conversation was how Leslie described the shift from scale to depth in practical terms.

She talked about how easy it is to fall into the assumption that bigger automatically means better. More members must mean a stronger community. More events must mean more engagement. More activity must mean more impact.

Most of us have worked in environments that reinforce that thinking, so it makes sense. I’ve certainly been there myself. I’ve had plenty of conversations over the years where internal stakeholders wanted more members, more programming, more visible activity, because that felt like the clearest proof that the community was working.

The challenge is that relationships don’t really work that way.

Community is relational. It isn’t transactional. And when you’re dealing in relationships, volume doesn’t tell you much on its own. You have to look underneath it.

Leslie shared that some of the biggest community moments she’d built weren’t actually the ones that had the most impact. What mattered more was the energy in the room, whether the right people were connecting, and whether the experience made them want to come back. That landed with me because it lines up so closely with what I’ve seen in my own work. The moments people remember are rarely the ones with the biggest top-line numbers. They’re the moments where something clicked. A conversation opened up. Someone felt seen. A relationship started.

That’s the part that creates gravity.

You can buy reach. You can drive impressions. You can get people in the door. But you can’t force the kind of connection that makes someone feel like this is a place worth returning to.

The difference between an audience and a community

Another part of the conversation that stayed with me was Leslie’s framing of what depth of engagement actually looks like in practice.

It’s easy to talk about depth in vague terms, but she made it much more concrete. For her, the shift happens when a community moves from consumption to contribution. That’s when people stop behaving like an audience and start behaving like participants.

You see it when members welcome each other instead of waiting for the host to do it. You see it when people answer each other’s questions, offer perspective from their own experience, or share something honest that didn’t go according to plan. You see it when the community team becomes less central over time because the members themselves are carrying more of the interaction.

That distinction matters a lot.

A support forum can be useful. A resource hub can be useful. A content destination can be useful. But usefulness alone doesn’t create community. Community starts to take shape when people feel like they’re part of something, not just passing through it.

I liked Leslie’s comparison to a community center. You don’t go there to sit alone. You go because there’s a back-and-forth. There are familiar faces. There’s recognition. There’s some sense that you belong there.

That’s a much more helpful standard than raw activity. It gets closer to the actual experience members are having.

Why smaller spaces often create stronger connection

This is also where the conversation got especially relevant for teams that are trying to balance broad programs with more intimate experiences.

A lot of businesses still assume the goal is to bring everyone into one big tent and keep expanding from there. Sometimes that broad layer is necessary. It gives people a common home base. It creates visibility. It can be a very useful place for content, education, and general participation.

But it usually isn’t enough on its own.

Leslie shared a great example from her time leading the coach community at BetterUp. There was a large shared identity there. Everyone belonged to the same broad professional group. But the deeper connection often happened when people gathered around a second layer of identity. Coaches in Europe. Spanish-speaking coaches. Male coaches in a female-heavy profession. Those smaller, more specific spaces created a different kind of recognition.

I’ve seen versions of that pattern again and again. The broader community gives people a place to enter. The smaller space gives them a reason to stay.

That’s part of why intimate formats can be so effective when they’re done well. Local meetups. Small dinners. Cohorts. Focused peer groups. Targeted discussions. These aren’t just smaller versions of the big thing. They create a different kind of interaction entirely.

And that interaction tends to be where the best stuff happens.

Why this can be hard to explain inside a business

If you’ve led community inside a company, none of this is especially surprising. The harder part is usually helping the rest of the business understand it.

Leslie made a point I strongly agree with: community is a business strategy, but it often sits inside functions that are measured in very transactional ways. Marketing, sales, support, sometimes success. Those teams all have valid goals, but they are often operating on binary systems. Did someone click? Convert? Open? Close? Buy? Renew?

Community doesn’t fit neatly into that structure.

That doesn’t mean it can’t drive business outcomes. It absolutely can. In many cases, it drives some of the most durable ones. But the path is different. You’re not just sending a message and measuring the response. You’re creating the conditions for people to respond to each other, to build trust, to share context, and to generate the kind of insight and loyalty that doesn’t happen in a one-step transaction.

This explains why so much of the job of a community builder is educational. We have to help people understand that the question isn’t just how many people showed up. It’s what happened when they did. Why? Because that’s where the signal is.

Where business value actually shows up

I was glad we spent time on this part, because it’s the piece community leaders are constantly trying to translate for cross-functional teams.

When deeper engagement is there, the business outcomes become much more tangible.

Product teams get better feedback because people share what they really think without needing to be formally asked. Retention gets stronger because people feel known, not just served. Advocacy becomes more credible because it’s rooted in real relationship, not just a request sent to a list.

Leslie talked about this in a way that felt very true to me. The stronger outcomes usually come from higher-signal moments. A thoughtful conversation. A trusted relationship. A member who feels safe enough to be candid. A smaller experience that creates emotional connection instead of just visibility.

That kind of value can be harder to summarize in one clean metric. But once you’ve seen it, it’s hard to mistake for anything else.

Where I’d start

One thing I appreciated is that Leslie didn’t make this sound bigger than it needs to be.

You don’t have to overhaul your whole program to move in this direction. In most cases, I’d advise against that anyway. The better approach is usually to start with what’s already there and look for where more depth could naturally emerge.

That might mean paying attention to the identities inside your broader audience and seeing where people are already clustering. It might mean creating one smaller experience for a focused group of members. It might mean asking better questions and designing more opportunities for people to talk to each other rather than only responding to the brand.

Start with one thing. See what happens. Listen closely. Then build from there.

That has been one of the most durable lessons in community for me. You learn a lot more from one real interaction than from a perfectly designed theory of how people might behave.

And if the experience gives people a reason to come back, you’re probably onto something.

▶️ Watch the full replay from our webinar here.

Key takeaways

Deeper community value usually comes from connection, trust, and repeat participation, not reach alone.

A large community can still feel empty if members don’t have a reason to engage with one another.

Smaller, more intentional experiences often create stronger recognition, belonging, and insight.

One of the clearest signs of community health is when members begin carrying more of the conversation themselves.

The most useful place to start is usually small: one focused group, one stronger question, or one more intentional gathering.

FAQ

What does “depth of engagement” mean in a community?

It means members are doing more than consuming content. They’re contributing, building relationships, and returning because the experience feels relevant and worthwhile.

Why doesn’t community scale always lead to stronger outcomes?

Because more people does not automatically create more connection. Without relevance, trust, and interaction, a larger audience can still produce very little real community value.

How do smaller community experiences help?

They make it easier for people to recognize shared context, participate more honestly, and build relationships that are harder to create in broader settings.

What’s a good first step for teams that want more resonance?

Start with one smaller, more intentional experience inside the broader program and build around a clear shared identity, challenge, or need.

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